


Disclosure

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drama, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-04
Updated: 2008-01-09
Packaged: 2019-01-19 03:21:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12402033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: A collection of AU stories about Hogwart's Next Generation. Co-authored with ToxicLemons.





	1. althea fawcett

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

_I never loved nobody fully, always one foot on the ground, and by protecting my heart truly, I got lost in the sounds_

It’s five AM on a Thursday morning and Althea Alexandra Fawcett is more trashed than she has ever been before.

Even more than that time all the students in her year (Even the Hufflepuffs. Hell, even the Gryffindors) had a Christmas party in the Room of Requirement and Acheron Cornfoot spiked the punch.

Even more than her seventeenth birthday when Uncle Charlie told her she looked exactly like her mum did at that age and she and Violet did shots in the attic until she could look at herself in the mirror again.

She’s drunk and she’s lying spread-eagle in the middle of her living room while the man she picked up at the Pheonix sleeps it off in her bed.

Thea doesn’t like being drunk. The lack of control makes her edgy and paranoid when all she wants to be is loud and maudlin. She decided it was worth it and left the house right after mailing her last phone bill (which was only 30 dollars, but she almost came up short). She went to the dingy little bar down the road, The Pheonix, and did things that would make her mother turn in her grave.

She likes the Pheonix. Most people there are witches and wizards and know not to ask questions when someone wants to take you home drunk.

  
__And it breaks my heart, and it breaks my heart, and it breaks my heart, it breaks my heart_ _

She’d never been to the Pheonix on a weeknight before, but it's October 25th and her invitation to the wedding of Antoinette Rosier to Lysander Ares Malfoy said October 24th. She supposes they’re off somewhere exotic by now, or maybe France. Lysander always liked France.

She looks up at the dark stains of her ceiling and wonders why she didn’t rip out Antoinette throat while she had the chance.

The man in the bedroom rolls over and makes a little noise. Althea can’t quite remember his name, or what he looked like except that he had very striking eyes that reminded her of Ly. So she took him home and they didn’t speak, they just got it over with and fell asleep.

__Suppose I never ever saw you, suppose we never ever called, suppose I kept on singing love songs just to break my own fall, just to break my fall_ _

She stands up and the world is still spinning. She looks down and sees ripped boxers she stole from Ly one night a very long time ago along with a pinkish tank top that’s seen better days. She look like shit and she knows it so she goes into the bathroom, brushes her hair, splashes water on her face, hoping to look a little more human.

It doesn’t help because she can’t look in the mirror to check, just like she can’t look in the bedroom. 

__All my friends say that of course its gonna get better, gonna get bette, better better better better, better better better_ _

When her vision finally clears and she feels like the world is still again, the clock says six thirty. She still hasn’t gone into the bedroom but she wants go in and throw the man with the fantastic eyes out. She wants to curl up in her bed and sleep till her life is better, but she knows she can’t.

She decides instead to curl up next to the kitchen counter and look out the window at the cars. It makes more sense to sit there and think about how truly wasted she is inside than wake someone up from a perfectly good sleep.

__I hear in my mind all these words, I hear in my mind, all this music, and it breaks my heart, it breaks my heart_ _

She can’t help it when her entire body starts to shake with silent sobs and her eyes flood. The car lights outside start to blur together and if she weren’t so empty at that moment she might even think it looked pretty.

Althea was not by any means a naïve person, but she couldn’t process this. She couldn’t figure out in her head why her life had to turn to such absolute shit. At school she would laugh, and smile, and plan her life. She was going to be a writer and Ly was going to be an Auror and they were going to be best friends and share everything and not care what the world thought.

But she wasn’t a writer. She was a half-assed waitress in a shitty apartment. She was alone.

The sobs got bigger and stronger until she felt like her entire chest would explode with the pressure.

She was the only one in the whole equation who got absolutely and entirely fucked over. Ly was an Auror with a perfect wife and a nice house. All her old associates were living the lives they had set out to (or at least, they weren’t living in this shit hole.)

How did her life get so irrevocably fucked up?

_I hear in my mind all of these voices_  
I hear in my mind all of these words  
I hear in my mind all of this music  
  
Breaks my  
Heart  
Breaks my heart

_Lyrics from “Fidelity” by Regina Spektor._


	2. althea fawcett

It’s almost winter. She’s lying, eyes closed, on her cold, white (ish), stark bathroom floor in nothing but a pair of ragged old shorts and a tank top. She’s called in sick to work and she’s fairly certain if she stays on the bathroom floor long enough she might get a cold to prove it. She doesn’t find the fact that she’s lying spread-eagle as kinky as she would have when she was in her teens and for some reason it bothers her. But today isn’t a day to contemplate that.

It’s November twenty-sixth, 2007. Twenty years after the death of her mother and holy fuck it’s cold.

She feels like she should light a candle or look through a photo album or something, but she can’t because she’s lost feeling in her limbs and she feels completely flat and stuck to the floor. She wonders if she would be able to see her breath if she opened her eyes. Maybe her skin will turn white and then blue and then she’d stop moving and die like her mother. Cold and alone.

At least her mother probably had the sense to wear a fucking jacket.

Thea thinks hard and remembers very little about her mother. Lavender Brown, never Fawcett. Hit Witch Brown. Sebastian Fawcett’s something or other. She was pretty and strong and read her The Happy Brown Bunny every single night. 

The only clear memory she has of her mother is of when she died. It was November, but it wasn’t this cold. She was with her father in her mum’s old London flat complaining to daddy about the green grass on the front lawn.

It was Cho Chang that Apparated to their flat that day. The mysterious and somewhat prudish Unspeakable who’d been over for dinner a few times that Thea could remember. She never registered the exact wording of a speech Cho had obviously rehearsed. Something about Russia and Death Eaters that had thrown her dad into a rage and made him crack the front window.

It wasn’t until years later at school that she even heard the full story from a second year boy who’s father had been there. She’d punched his lights out and made him cry until Violet and Afton finally pulled her off.

She’s never considered it fair. Her mother was not meant to go out like that. She was a survivor, a war hero with the scars to prove it. Lavender Brown was meant to go out in a bright ball of flame, fighting the good fight, not freezing to death in some god-awful corner of Siberia. Tough Shit, her father wrote to her once before he too disappeared.

She’s never understood her parents’ relationship either. Not many people ever did. She supposes it’s why Seamus Finnigan can’t even look her in the eye but still sends her a card every holiday. It wasn’t until she was a hardened Slytherin ruler that she truly understood why. Having Uncle Seamus over seemed normal as a child and the too-long hugs between him and her mother had to be something everyone’s pseudo relatives did. Now she understands better and respectfully keeps her distance, sending only the most distant and polite correspondence.

It’s the same with other of her mother’s friends and co-workers. After the funeral they would send letters and little gifts and then drift away when they realized that Lavender’s harsh, temperamental, Slytherin daughter was far more like her father.

She sighs to make sure her lungs still work and imagines that if her dad has any friends who don’t eat people, they’ll be far more accommodating.


End file.
